La Nueva Frontera: Courting A Sleeping Giant

The spirit of Cinco de Mayo wasn't the only thing that inspired George W. Bush to deliver his weekly radio address in Spanish last month. His strategists have been doing the math, and it goes like this: unless Bush raises his marks with minorities--particularly Hispanics--he could lose the 2004 election by 3.5 million votes. By next year, Hispanics will be the dominant ethnic group in at least 15 additional House districts; and every state slated for a new seat in Congress has a growing Hispanic population to thank for it.

The biggest political news of the 2000 Census was that Hispanics--more than half of them tracing their roots to Mexico--have become the largest minority group in the U.S., surpassing African Americans at least six years sooner than expected. Where that's happening is turning out to be as surprising as how fast. Of the congressional districts that saw the biggest increases in their Latino populations over the past decade, not a single one is in a state along the Mexican border. Rural areas saw huge growth in Hispanic populations, but so did cities and suburbs. By the end of this year, four of the eight largest U.S. cities may have Hispanic mayors. "It's the only part of the electorate that's growing," says Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

But while that means that politicians in places as diverse as Las Vegas and Jasper County, S.C., are courting these constituents as never before, Hispanic political clout still lags far behind the numbers--and will for perhaps a generation to come, Latino leaders fear. Even in parts of the country where Latinos have long been the largest ethnic group, they only "help shape things," says University of Texas political scientist Rodolfo de la Garza. "They don't lead things. They don't define things."

Where Hispanics have just arrived, they've only just begun to crack the city councils, the school boards and the county commissions. Though Hispanics account for one-fifth of Nevada's population, there are only two Latinos in the 63-member state legislature, and virtually none hold local office in the cities and counties where they are the most highly concentrated. "We're on the ground floor of political empowerment," says Gonzalez.

The once-a-decade exercise of redistricting now under way in every state will help mobilize Latino voters and encourage them to seek elected office. But no one expects Latinos to show the kind of huge gains that the Congressional Black Caucus made after the 1992 election. Indeed, the boom in the Hispanic population has fostered political tension between the two minority groups. "On issues, we're very close," Gonzalez says, "but power is power." Black legislators in Georgia, a state that saw a quadrupling of its Hispanic population over the past decade, opposed a bill that would expand a minority-business tax break to include brown-owned firms.